Question: Overview

As you have already learned in your Discussion Board this week, quality assurance in any project might be the most important but overlooked aspect of a project. Lack of quality management, however, can cause an entire project to fail if the final project deliverables do not meet customer expectations and standards. Implementing quality assurance throughout the project minimizes the risk of nonacceptance of project deliverables by the customer.

In this course, you are asked to develop a Quality Management Integration Plan (Key Assignment) that allows you to select and integrate quality management tools, models, and techniques in the overall performance of the project. You will select a project that you may have developed in a previous class or a known project in an organization.

Throughout this course, you will be working on developing several components of your final Key Assignment. Additional information and the deliverables for each Individual Project will be provided in the assignment description for this project.

In this first Individual Project, you will submit a proposal of your project to your instructor; develop a shell document of all sections of the Key Assignment, complete the first three sections of the Plan. The combined Individual Project (IP) assignments will be your final Key Assignment deliverable.

Project Selection

The first step will be to select a project that you develop a Quality Management Integration Plan for. This project will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

1. Nontrivial: The selected project candidate should reflect a real-life project.

2. Domain knowledge: You will be applying knowledge of this project to address assignments related to quality management, integration, and performance.

Select a project that fits these requirements, and submit your proposal to your instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first few days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.

Assignment: Your first task in this process will be to select a project to use as the basis of your Key Assignment. You will also create the shell document for the final project Key Assignment document deliverable that you will be working on throughout the course. As you proceed through each project phase, you will add content to each section of the final document to progressively complete the final project delivery, which is the Quality Management Integration Plan.

The project deliverables are as follows:

• Submit the project proposal to your instructor for approval.

• Quality Management Integration Plan

1. Use Word

2. Title page

• Course number and name

• Project name

• Your name

• Date

3. Table of Contents (TOC)

• Use an autogenerated TOC.

• This should be on a separate page.

• This should be a maximum of 3 levels deep.

• Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so that it is up-to-date before submitting your project.

4. Section Headings (create each heading on a new page with "TBD" as content, except for Week 1)

• Plan Quality Management Week 1: Project Outline

• Plan Quality Management Week 1: Organizational Readiness for Quality Management

• Plan Quality Management Week 1: Quality Systems Analysis

• Perform Quality Management Week 2: Quality Dimensions and Criteria

• Perform Quality Assurance Week 3: Quality Process Improvement Tools and Techniques

• Control Quality Week 4: Quality Performance Monitoring and Control

• Control Quality Week 5: Management's Role in Quality Management

• Control Quality Week 5: Quality Performance Communication Plan

Create the following sections for Week 1:

1. Project Outline

• Include a brief description of the project.

• Describe the overall project deliverables.

• Material can be taken from the approved proposal that you submitted to the instructor. This may serve as the draft for the proposal.

• Be sure that this project is approved by the instructor.

2. Organizational Readiness for Quality Management

• Discuss which quality systems the organization employs today.

• Discuss the organization's readiness to incorporate the selected project.

• Include additional support that might be required to incorporate quality management (e.g., a knowledgeable quality champion).

3. Quality Systems Analysis

• Discuss the pros and cons of at least 3 quality systems (e.g., ISO 9000, Six Sigma, plan-do-check-act or plan-do-study-act, Capability Maturity Model Integration [CMMI], organizational project management maturity model [OPM3®], Malcolm Baldrige).

• Identify which one or combination is most appropriate for this project, and discuss why.

4. Name the document "LastName_FirstName_MPM357_IP1.doc."